Guy and Seth on Simulink

September 28th, 2012

As we highlighted recently, Simulink R2012b has a ton of new features. During the next weeks, we will try to provide as much details as possible on all this new cool stuff.

For this week, I will start with the basic of navigating models.

Zooming

In R2012b, zooming is a lot more dynamic with the mouse wheel. Here is a short animation where I highlight all the possible ways to zoom in R2012b:

In case you have problems getting used to scroll wheel zooming, you can go to the Simulink preference and uncheck the Scroll wheel controls zooming option:

Panning

Before R2012b, panning could be done using P or Q in combination with the left mouse button. The result was equivalent to moving the scrollbars at the top and bottom of your model. I am not sure why, but I almost never used this feature.

In R2012b, the panning is easier to access, with the middle mouse button or a combination of the spacebar and left mouse button.

The panning is also more powerful. It allows you to increase the dimensions of the model in any direction:

My personal experience

I need to be honest with you... getting used to Simulink R2012b was a good challenge for me.

Before R2012b, the 4 most used keys on my keyboard were R, F, V and 1. Every time I opened a new model I was using those to zoom in, zoom out or zoom 100%.

I tried the new panning and zooming for a few weeks. After some frustration because I ended up zooming instead of scrolling, I tried disabling the scrolling zoom. That quickly made me realize that using the scroll wheel to zoom is very useful and after just a few hours I re-enabled the option.

About the panning, it forced me to develop new muscles. Since I was never using the middle button of my mouse, that gesture initially felt weird, like if it was requiring a lot of efforts in my finger to push that middle button.

After a few months using Simulink R2012b, I now try to use the middle mouse button to pan everywhere and end up saying to myself: Why is that software not panning with the middle button?

Now that I have been using Simulink R2012b for a few months, I absolutely love it. Everything is more easy.

The other day I had to test something in R2012a and when I opened the model I asked myself: How was I satisfied with this old interface?

Now it's your turn

Refer to the Zoom and Pan Block Diagrams page for more details, and let us know what you think of Simulink R2012b by leaving a comment here.

By Guy Rouleau

12:53 UTC | Posted in What's new? | Permalink | 6 Comments »

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6 Responses to “Zooming and Panning in Simulink R2012b”

1. Paul replied on September 29th, 2012 at 03:18 UTC :
   

   Looks great. Me wants it!

2. Aditya Shah replied on October 1st, 2012 at 11:28 UTC :
   

   Is there an easy way in 2012b to hide a block name? In older versions you could click and drag to select a block name and then delete it.

3. Guy Rouleau replied on October 1st, 2012 at 12:16 UTC :
   

   @ Aditya,

   Wow! I have to admit… I had never realized you could do this maneuver in previous releases.

   I will report this to our development team.

   In R2012b, to hide a block name you need to right-click on the block and disable the “Show Block Name” in the Format section.

   Programmatically, this can be done using set_param(gcb,’ShowName’,'off’). If you really need something quicker, you could associate a shortcut to this command using an sl_customization.

4. Paul replied on November 3rd, 2012 at 06:26 UTC :
   

   It’s because I’m such an avid reader of this site, that I felt the need to comment. While the new Simulink looks impressive, I’m guessing the majority of readers are interested in physical examples and problem solving techniques, not minor feature demos. I’m sorry, I know that’s harsh…

5. Paul replied on November 3rd, 2012 at 20:24 UTC :
   

   Sorry, the above comment was meant for the post “Resizing blocks in R2012b”… My apologies.

6. Thomas Marullo replied on November 4th, 2012 at 09:40 UTC :
   

   Is this a masked block? If so, I am curious of how you edited the mask to make the inputs, outputs and block description to look this good.

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